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Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Specialist for the IBM System Storage product line at the
IBM Executive Briefing Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor
to IBM's developerWorks. In 2011, Tony celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM Storage on the same day as the IBM's Centennial. He is
author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services. You can also follow him on Twitter @az990tony.
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I have arrived safely to San Francisco, and was able to check-in at the hotel, pick up my registration badge for Oracle OpenWorld 2011, and attend the first keynote session. This is the largest Oracle OpenWorld event to-date, with over 45,000 attendees from 117 different countries. There are 520,000 square feet of exhibition floor, and over 2,400 educational sessions. The conference is spread across the different buildings of the Moscone center, as well as nearby hotels. On average, attendees will walk seven miles during the week.

Larry Ellison was the keynote speaker for this first kick-off session. He focused almost exclusively on server and storage hardware. He feels that business is all about moving data, not doing integer math.

Exadata

At the beginning of 2011, Oracle had only sold about 1,000 Exadata, but they have a sales target to sell an additional 3,000 Exadata boxes by year end.
The Exadata offers up to 10x columnar compression, and has 10x faster bandwidth (40Gbps Infiniband versus 4Gbps FCP). If you have a 100TB database, it would take up only 10TB of disk with this approach. He claims that the 90TB of disk you don't have to buy can then be used to buy more DRAM and/or Flash SSD.

(Realistically, since SSD is 15x more expensive than spinning disk, you can only purchase about 6TB of Flash for the 90TB you save on disk!)

Larry claims the design point for Exadata and Exalogic was to offer a system that was more powerful than IBM's fastest P795 computer, but cheaper than commodity x86 hardware. His secret is to "Parallel everything" for faster performance, and no single points of failure (SPOF). Exadata offers up to 10-50x faster query, and 4-10x faster OLTP. To keep costs low, Exadata uses all commodity hardware except the Infiniband. He cited various customer examples:

A company replaced 36 Teradata with 3 Exadata and result was application was 8x faster.

Banco Chile 9x faster than previous system

Deutsche Post 60x faster

Sogetti gets 60x faster backups.

French bank BNP Paribas 17x faster and no change to applications.

Proctor & Gamble 18x faster

Merck 5x faster

Turkcell 250TB compressed to 25TB, 10x faster

The problem was that in each example, he said what it was compared against was the old previous system, which varies and could have been an older Sun system, or an old system from HP, IBM or Dell. Perhaps it was a freudian slip, but Larry mistakenly said "Paralyze" your applications, when he probably meant to "Parallelize".

SPARC Supercluster

Of all their 380,000 Oracle customers, 70 percent have SPARC/Solaris and/or Linux. Last week, Oracle announced the new SPARC-T4, which Larry claimed was 5x faster than the previous SPARC-T3. Larry feels that for the first time ever, a non-IBM CPU can challenge the long-standing rein of the IBM POWER series processor. Larry admitted that the IBM POWER7 chip actually did some tasks faster than the SPARC-T4, so his work is not yet done, but they plan to offer a new SPARC-T5 next year that will be 2x better than the SPARC-T4.

Larry compared the I/O bandwidth of serv ers based on SPARC-T4, compared to POWER7, and found that the SPARC-T4 has double the I/O bandwidth, for a cost that was only about 1/4 the cost of a mainframe. IBM offers both. POWER7-based servers for CPU-intensive workloads, and System z (S/390)-based systems for I/O-intensive workloads. Larry feels that even though POWER7 is superior than SPARC-T4 for mathematical calculations, all business applications are focused on I/O-bandwidth to move data, not computations.

Larry claims the new SPARC-T4 can do 1.2 million IOPS. He uses 40 Gbps Infiniband instead of traditional SAN-attached FCP solutions.

Exalytics

A new "box" called Exalytics, combines their commodity hardware platform with a hueristic adaptive in-memory cache, their latest "me-too" solution that compares with what IBM already offers in [IBM SolidDB]. In fact, their me-too is not even internally developed, but rather the result of an acquisition of a company called "Times Ten". I thought it was interesting that the only piece of Oracle software mentioned during Larry's 90-minute speach, was this piece of acquired technology. The new Exalytics product run on a small rack and grow, analyzing relational data, non-relational OLAP, as well as unstructured documents. The result is what Larry called "the Speed of Light".

He also mentioned that Bob Shimp would kick-off the Cloud later in the week. Given that Larry himself thought that Cloud was a stupid, over-marketed term that nobody has deployed over the past few years, to a complete believer, claiming that over 20 live demos will be given this year on Cloud.

Perhaps the funniest quote was his motivation to use Infiniband as the interconnect

"Ethernet was invented by Xerox when I was a child."
-- Larry Ellison

Here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Monday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

IBM Cloud Computing Solutions for Oracle

10/03/11, 10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m., Solution Spotlight, Booth #1111 Moscone South
Presenter: Chuck Calio,Technical Strategist, IBM Systems & Technology Group
IBM is recognized in the IT industry as one of the "Big 6" cloud providers, along with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and Yahoo. This session will highlight how IBM Cloud offerings apply to Oracle applications.

Lowering Cost and increasing efficiency in your long term support of Oracle EPM and BI

Tuesday morning at the [Oracle OpenWorld 2011] conference started with another keynote session. This time, Michael Dell, founder, chairman and CEO of Dell, Inc., presented. Over the past nine years, he feels "the line between business and IT is going away." Michael claims that "Dell is no longer a PC company", and instead is focusing on data center solutions and services to be more like IBM.

John Fowler, Executive VP for Oracle Hardware, claims that Oracle has a single team for hardware development. The SPARC-T4 is their newest chip, with 8 cores and 64 dynamic threads, running at 3.0 GHz. It has on-chip 10GbE ethernet, PCIe, DDR3 Memory controllers and Crypto features. For storage, Oracle now offers four different offerings:

Exadata (as Database storage)

ZFS Storage Array (NAS)

Pillar Axiom (block-level I/O)

StorageTek tape

Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, indicated that the new Oracle Linux kernel allows for zero downtime patches, meaning that you can update the OS while applications are running without a reboot. The OracleVM (based on open-source XEN) supports both x86 and SPARC-based server hosts. On x86, it can run Linux, Solaris and Windows guests. On SPARC, it can run Linux and Solaris guests.

John Loaiza, Oracle Senior VP, explained the Exadata. It has 168 disk drives and 56 PCIe Flash Cards, connected via 40Gbps Infiniband. The Exadata keeps all data on spinning disk, with "warm data" cached on Flash, and "hot data" cached on DRAM. This is similar to IBM's Easy Tier feature on the DS8000, SVC and Storwize V7000.

Brad Cameron, Senior Director, explained Exalogic, which pre-dates Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The idea was to build an x86 machine for running Java applications on Oracle WebLogic. The Exalogic can connect via Infiniband to an Exadata to access database information, and to 10GbE ethernet for the rest of the servers and clients. Whether you get the quarter, half or full-rack system, you get 40TB of NAS storage.

Ganesh Ramamurthy, Oracle VP of Hardware Engineering, presented the SPARC Supercluster. This combines the storage cells from Exadata, the compute nodes from Exalogic, shared NAS storage using ZFS file system, and Solaris 11 with OracleVM. Taking a cue from IBM's zEnterprise Unified Resource Manager, Oracle is offering centralized management for all the layers in their SPARC Supercluster stack. The SPARC Supercluster is intended as general purpose machine, and can be used to run non-Oracle applications like SAP. From a storage perspective, he claims that the storage in the SPARC Supercluster is 2.5x better than EMC VMAX, which basically puts it comparable to IBM XIV pricing.

For my readers in San Francisco attending Oracle OpenWorld, here are some sessions that IBM is featuring on Wednesday. Note the first two are Solution Spotlight sessions at the IBM Booth #1111 where I will be most of the time.

In the Heat of the Oracle Fusion Decision-Making Process: What's Your Next Move?

10/05/11, 10:00 a.m. -- 11:00 a.m., OpenWorld session #9423
Presenter: Esther Parker, IBM
This session discusses how companies can embrace Oracle Fusion so they can meet their business objectives today and in the future.